Aurora debunked; British hostility; revolution
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Location

Aleppo, Syria

Year

1919

Item Detail

Letter to mother, Oct 21, 1919

Context

Stanley Elphinstone Kerr (1894–1976) served as a volunteer with Near East Relief from 1919 to 1922, initially assigned to Aleppo as a clinical biochemist and sanitary officer, where he also worked as a photographer and assisted in recovering Armenian children from Kurdish and Turkoman households.

In the autumn of 1919 he transferred to Marash (present-day Kahramanmaraş), where he headed American relief operations during the Franco-Turkish conflict and the siege of January–February 1920, in which an estimated 9,000 of the city's 20,000 Armenians perished. After the French evacuation, Kerr remained with the surviving Armenian population before departing with the last group of orphans in 1922. He later published The Lions of Marash (1973), a detailed account of these events.

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  • Holding Institution

    Zoryan Institute

  • Attribution

    Courtesy of the Kerr Family. Stanley Kerr Archives, Zoryan Institute.

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  • Document Contents

    British hatred of Armenians described as universal and from one source; Dunaway finds Aurora Mardiganian’s sister and discovers published account fabricated; bloodless Nationalist revolution in Konia; British releasing Turkish war prisoners to Adana; Druze-Christian tensions; brigands kill Armenians near Adana

Aurora debunked; British hostility; revolution